| 90 |
Film.com
One of the best films of this year...unlike anything you've seen on the big screen.
|
| 80 |
Village Voice
A dark and unsparing study of female masochism and a brittle sex comedy of manners, Romance is unsettled in tone, to say the least.
|
| 80 |
Salon.com
Ray Sawhill
A landmark -- the first movie to give a convincing, feature-length account of sex from a woman's point of view.
|
| 75 |
Chicago Sun-Times
I did not really enjoy this movie, and yet I recommend it. Why? Because I think it's on to something interesting. Here is a movie about a woman who never stops thinking. That may not be as good for you as it is for her.
|
| 75 |
New York Post
Despite many flaws...Romance is unquestionably an important film.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
No other mainstream movie has so openly tackled the subject of female sexual experience.
|
| 70 |
LA Weekly
There's never been a movie director like Catherine Breillat, a fearless visionary and one hell of a woman.
|
| 67 |
Entertainment Weekly
The movie is a footnote as well, a minor reference back to the days when people yearned for a cinema that was serious and erotic at the same time.
|
| 63 |
Chicago Tribune
A singularly cheerless trip, explicit but sterile, racy but dull.
|
| 60 |
Newsweek
For those who believe that movies are a proper place to explore the riddle of sex, no holds barred, this movie is de rigueur.
|
| 60 |
Chicago Reader
The eroticism is powerful, and the documentary candor and directness of the sex scenes make this well worth seeing.
|
| 53 |
Mr. Showbiz
Showing the sex seems to be the film's raison d'etre, which gets you only so far.
|
| 50 |
Boston Globe
Lots of sex, but little joy.
|
| 50 |
Rolling Stone
A cheerless exercise.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Chronicle
It's like watching a bad update of an Antonioni film.
|
| 50 |
San Francisco Examiner
An au natural (read: graphic) tryst-a-thon whose fashion sense is outweighed only by its bulky sexual intellectualism.
|
| 50 |
The New York Times
Janet Maslin
Hovers between passion and philosophical argument without fully achieving its ambition to fuse the two.
|
| 50 |
Christian Science Monitor
More cautionary than titillating...some of it (is) deliberately disturbing.
|
| 40 |
TV Guide
Visually stunning and breathtakingly frank, but thrill-seekers beware.
|
| 30 |
Dallas Observer
The fact that Romance was written and directed by a woman doesn't make the film any better; it simply makes it objectionable on other grounds.
|
| 30 |
Austin Chronicle
Sex may, indeed, be all in the mind, but Romance fails to score in the mind's eye.
|
| 25 |
Baltimore Sun
Catherine Breillat's pretentious, meandering, self-indulgent portrait of a libidinously deprived young woman is nothing more than pornography tricked out as feminist parable.
|
| 20 |
Film.com
Exists in some kind of limbo, between hard-core porn and European art film, and it's not likely to satisfy fans of either.
|
| 20 |
Time
It's mostly an ordeal--for actress and audience.
|
| 20 |
Los Angeles Times
As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."
|
| 0 |
TNT RoughCut
The film so strongly fixates on strange, explicit sexual acts that it forgoes any emotional (i.e. romantic) aspects of sex.
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